Businesses frequently make use of personal information in normal commerce. For example, if a customer buys an airline ticket online, the customer may enter various information or data regarding the customer. For example, the customer may input a name, payment information, birthdate, and contact information such as e-mail address and phone number. This information allows the airline to successfully link the ticket purchased to an individual customer and properly receive payment for the airline ticket.
In response to the purchase of an airline ticket, the airline may save various information related to the transaction with the customer. For example, the airline will save the customer's name and birthdate so that when the customer arrives at the airport an airline staff person can identify the customer by comparing the information in the system to a customer's government issued identification, for example.
When a customer performs a transaction with a business, the business also often gives information to the customer. In the most basic example, a receipt might be provided to a customer who makes a purchase at a retail store. Returning to the airline ticket purchased online example, the airline may provide an e-mail confirmation of the purchase to the customer. The e-mail confirmation can provide many different types of information. For example, the e-mail confirmation may include details of what was purchased, such as flight times, departure/arrival cities, seat assignments, and in-flight add-ons. The e-mail confirmation may additionally include a booking identifiers, which is a unique code linked to that purchase to make identifying the purchase in the future easy for the customer.
Additionally, these booking identifiers are often unique and contain a random sequence of alphanumeric characters. In this way, only the purchaser of the ticket has access to the booking identifier related to their purchased flight. This can add additional security to prevent fraud of another person attempting to use the flight ticket. Many other industries utilize booking identifiers, such as hotels, rental cars, shipping companies (such as a track your package type feature), online retail, tour organizers, cruise lines, and any other type of industry where purchase or reservation of the good or service occurs at a different time to the good being provided or the service being rendered.